9

Safe Streets, Safe City

Crime was New York City’s number-one problem when I was elected mayor. The size of the Police Department had dwindled under my predecessor, Ed Koch, and crime had risen. In fact, when I entered office, crime in New York City had been on an almost uninterrupted climb for fifteen years. Despite the NYPD’s best efforts, there had been 2,246 homicides in 1989, 211,130 burglaries, and 91,571 aggravated assaults. Crack cocaine had been introduced to the city’s streets and quickly metastasized into a plague. In the first year of my mayoralty, those numbers continued to increase. Developing and implementing a successful anticrime plan takes time, but I hadn’t been in office nine months when the New York Post ran a headline that screamed, “Dave, Do Something!” One would have gotten the impression that on December 31, 1989, there was no crime, and the next day, when I took office, the homicide rate was over 2,000 a year, as though it had occurred overnight.

I recognize that the accepted wisdom is that crime ran amok under my administration; it is an image that was hammered into the public mind by my opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, in his political campaigns. He and his brain trust needed an avenue of attack that was at once potent and visceral. They chose to tell New Yorkers—relentlessly and untruthfully—that our citizens were under assault, when in fact New York’s population was being defended as never before. The truth is in the details. From its peak in 1991, crime decreased more dramatically and more rapidly, both in terms of actual numbers and percentage, than at any time in modern New York City history. I drove down crime faster than any New York City mayor who came before me. Despite the budget deficit, my administration hired more new police officers than any other mayoral administration in the twentieth century. These were the same cops who were used to such advantage by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Giuliani in their highly trumpeted turnaround of New York. Putting our community policing theory into practice, we took these new cops out of patrol cars and put them on the street and in the city’s neighborhoods, creating a new kind of law enforcement that affected all levels of society. I hired Ray Kelly, whose reputation has grown so exponentially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The result was the successful turnaround of New York City’s crime rate, and it was conceived, initiated, and put into practice by my administration.

We implemented these changes within the bounds of an inherited budget that had been decimated by the struggling national economy in the middle of a massive recession. Before I took office, we had been told that the municipal budget was running at a deficit of $175 million; upon our arrival, my administration opened the books and found to our horror that the deficit was in fact $750 million. Rather than expanding the scope of city government to meet the needs of all New Yorkers, as we had envisioned, we were obliged to cut programs that would have served the community. (President Barack Obama faced much the same circumstance upon his election in 2008.)

I was not unaware that some portion of the electorate felt that now, with a black man elected mayor, crime would run rampant. Yet who were the victims of the majority of these crimes? We found that they were largely people from the city’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Many of these folks had put me in office, and while I was determined to be mayor of all New Yorkers, I would not forget the constituents who most solidly supported me. According to some, the victim was the entire concept of civil order, as if New Yorkers were being forced to cower before barbarians. The implication, which I found racist in the extreme, was that the criminal element was of color and their victims were civil society itself and the good citizens within. For example, the “squeegee men”—the homeless and mostly black men who congregated at off-ramps and highly trafficked crosstown corners to panhandle and harass motorists—were an intimidating symbol of civil disorder. Giuliani and others did their best to link me to them, as if I personified this disorder, which connected me to crime. The fact that in a city of eight million residents there were only approximately seventy-five of these men did not seem to matter. Nor did the fact that I had been a law-and-order candidate and had vowed to be, as I said in my inauguration speech, “the toughest mayor on crime the city has ever seen.”

How does one control crime? Well, that’s why every city has a police department. Where were the cops needed? When we asked, we found that the NYPD had not conducted an analytic study of the allocation of police officers throughout the city and precincts in about twenty-five years. Lee Brown was my police commissioner, with Ray Kelly his first deputy, and I asked that the department move quickly to give me the information I needed.

There was some talk about putting on an extra thousand officers. One thousand was a nice round number and would look good in the newspapers—as First Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel said, “It’s kind of a sniff test. How can anybody argue with a thousand cops?”—but that was just a guess. We didn’t need to guess at what was necessary to make New York safe: we required specific information that would yield effective results. Brown and Kelly gathered the brass and set about the task of gathering that information.

My vision of solving the crime problem extended beyond simply fanning out cops. The problems that afflicted New York were social and economic as well as criminal, and they involved the city’s children. You have heard the phrase “No chain is stronger than its weakest link.” This was particularly true of the criminal justice system. If we put more cops on the street, more arrests would inevitably follow. We would then need more assistant district attorneys to file the complaints, more court personnel to handle the increased number of cases, and an expanded probation department to help the judges decide the proper punishment in each case. The Corrections Department would need to be addressed, because if we were going to have more effective police protection and a greater number of arrests, we would need facilities in which to house the large influx of suspects and criminals. We would need an expanded parole system to handle people coming out of jail after serving their sentences. We needed a comprehensive plan to attack New York City’s crime in a way that would last a lifetime, and we needed the municipal funds to implement it.

From the outset I required a smart, experienced, highly respected person to head the Criminal Justice Department. My first choice was Judge Milton Mollen, the presiding justice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, Second Department. I was playing tennis with his son Scott one day and said, “I’ve got a great job for Milt, but he’ll never take it.” I explained what I had in mind. Scott said, “Why don’t you ask him?”

I invited Judge Mollen to breakfast with deputy mayors Bill Lynch and Norman Steisel at Gracie Mansion on a Saturday and told him I had an important job that needed doing desperately—criminal justice coordinator. He turned it down. I did not know that in his capacities as presiding justice he had been a member of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council and had seen a succession of criminal justice coordinators, most of them very capable people, come and go. “None of them have been the least bit productive,” he told me. The city’s five district attorneys were all elected, each had a constituency to whom to answer, and none cared what the coordinator wanted; they paid him no attention. Milt told me, “Criminal justice coordinators are totally useless. They don’t accomplish anything. If you want to serve the public interest, you do one of two things: you either abolish the job in its present form and forget about it, and save the taxpayers money”—the office was fully staffed—“or make it meaningful. ’Cause it’s not meaningful now. You’ve gotta make it a meaningful position.”

“What do you mean ‘a meaningful position’?”

“You’ve gotta give the person who holds that position deputy mayor status, so when he speaks, he speaks as a representative of the mayor, he’s not just another bureaucrat. The status will generate respect and cooperation. A person who can implement that and use that status to the public’s advantage, and the mayor’s, there’s a chance, if he’s a strong enough personality, that he can truly be meaningful in the position and accomplish things on your and the city’s behalf.”

The meeting lasted about an hour and a half. I spent a good part of the weekend considering the judge’s advice. Monday morning I started tongues wagging by visiting him at his courthouse. “I’ve thought about it,” I told him, “and I want to do it your way. Give it any title you want—deputy mayor for public safety, deputy mayor for criminal justice—but with deputy mayor status.”

He said he would make his decision within forty-eight hours.

Milt Mollen was born and raised in New York City, went to college and law school here, and after serving in World War II came back to the city to live and work. New York was in his bones—he understood and knew it intimately. He had earned many significant jobs in government. When the New York World-Telegram and Sun, one of the city’s many newspapers in existence at that time, called him the new “housing czar” of the Robert Wagner administration, his friends called him Czar Milton the First. It was by no means his last position of importance.

When we spoke of his joining my administration, Milt had been a judge for twenty-four years, serving at the Appellate Division fourteen years, almost thirteen of those as the presiding justice, which within the world of the law and the court system was a very prestigious position. His was the busiest appellate court in the United States. Five judges would listen to the arguments, and they essentially established the law for the State of New York. The court had become known as the Mollen Court, and he loved that life.

I did not know this at the time, but one of the reasons Judge Mollen was ultimately receptive to my entreaty was that he was about to embark on his final year as presiding justice. He had served longer at that position than anyone in New York State history, but New York law mandated that he step down as presiding justice at age seventy. Although he was permitted to remain as a justice on the court until age seventy-six, he had made the decision to retire. His successor would be one of three colleagues who were vying for the position. They were a closely knit court, and he knew that some of those who were not chosen to preside would be looking to him for leadership and guidance. They had been looking to him for these qualities for the thirteen years he had served as a strong and effective presiding justice, and he knew they would continue to do so even after he stepped down. This would create problems for his successor, however, so he pledged his colleagues to secrecy and decided to clear out. In December 1989, two months before he and I had our discussion, Judge Mollen had told his colleagues that at the end of the following year he would be leaving the court. He didn’t tell them why. He had received partnership offers from large law firms and was considering them. He had been planning to wait until the end of the year before leaving, but my offer moved him along.

I told him the job was to help make the law enforcement aspects of public safety more effective. With that mandate, Judge Mollen called and accepted the job of deputy mayor for public safety. Some people ultimately referred to the position as deputy mayor for public safety and criminal justice. He said he would work with us for two years, which gave us enough time to get this right.

Dr. Lee Patrick Brown was police commissioner. An excellent staff was assembled to gather and analyze information and prepare a plan to fulfill this mandate, consisting of NYPD first deputy commissioner Ray Kelly, Office of Management deputy budget director Mike Jacobson, Office of Operations deputy director Regina Morris, and Judge Mollen’s chief of staff, Katie Lapp. They would report to Judge Mollen regarding general and law enforcement policy and to Norman Steisel concerning finances. By October 1990, we received the report. The 536-page document laid out in significant detail exactly what was needed to bring the department to its fullest working capacity. Some units would be consolidated, some restructured, others eliminated. Uniformed personnel on the entire force would increase by 25 percent, from 25,465 to 31,944. Uniformed personnel at the precinct level would increase 54 percent, and the number of investigators assigned to precinct detective squads would rise by 67 percent. There would be an increase in enforcement strength of 50 percent, dispatch time for crimes in progress would not exceed a minute and a half, and the 911 emergency system would continue to field approximately 4.2 million calls a year. Most significantly, the number of police officers on patrol every day would increase from 6,640 to 10,238, a gain of 54 percent.

In addition to personnel requirements, the report included a plan for substantially restructuring the organization of the department in order to implement the policy of community policing. The Community Patrol Officer Program (CPOP) would increase its size by 523 percent. Along with the extensive addition of uniformed personnel, a commitment was made to increase civilian personnel serving in a host of law enforcement functions to support the activities of the larger police presence—lawyers in the five district attorneys’ offices and Legal Aid, police crime lab technicians, food preparation workers in the jails, administrative clerks throughout the criminal justice system, social workers in the various Board of Education youth programs, librarians—which ultimately rose 41 percent, from 7,237 to 10,198.

We called our program Safe Streets, Safe City, with the subtitle Cops and Kids. In conjunction with increased spending and staffing for the NYPD, we developed a plan to create a series of newly conceived community centers. Our Department of Youth and Community Development commissioner Richard Murphy was very adept at devising ways and means to get things done without spending a lot of money, and he created this program. The idea was this: New York City public schools routinely closed after three o’clock in the afternoon, but since this was public space, why not use these buildings beyond the hours of instruction? Richard’s vision was that families should have a place they could go to for a period of time equal to the number of hours children were in school. He suggested that the city use these edifices during the nine hours from three until midnight by filling them with programs determined by the communities in which they were located. New York has recreational, vocational, and rehabilitative needs that change within a matter of blocks. Sports, art, drama—the possibilities were extensive. In Flushing there would be large numbers of immigrants who might need instruction in English as a second language; in five different sections of Brooklyn the population would be completely different, as would the programs. After school, at night, on weekends—why not use the resources available to us, fund them properly, and focus on an area not being well served by city government: the family? The communities would design the programs themselves. They would tell us, “You provide safe, secure, clean space and then leave and let us decide what to do with it.”

It is easy to laugh at the concept of basketball-after-dark as a justifiable use of precious city funds, and there was some derision from more than one municipal yahoo, but if at night young men and women are on the court learning teamwork and body control instead of on the corner looking for cheap thrills or a quick score, I feel that we as a government have done our job well. This amount of trust in and respect for the people of New York was startlingly unique.

We called them Beacon schools. They would be sources of light and inspiration.

Of course there were obstacles to overcome. The mayor’s office did not control these buildings; union contracts had left them largely under the purview of the janitors’ union, with whom we had to negotiate.

As we developed a comprehensive plan, our major question was always, where does the money come from? The program as conceived—hiring more cops and staffing the schools after hours—was costly, but we thought it was essential for the city and for the people to implement it. Budget director Phil Michaels, a conscientious guy trying to do his job, made it clear that the city did not have the funds, and he was not enamored of the restrictions on his discretionary spending that such a program would entail. Budget directors want complete flexibility concerning what they can do with money, so they can plug a hole here, fix a leak there. With the city unable to provide financing for such a project, we had to go to the state. The only way to come up with the needed funds was through a surcharge on the state personal income tax. This was no small problem.

Before we could approach the State Legislature, however, we needed to gain the support of the City Council. A mayor cannot personally request an increase in his city’s tax rate; it is required under the state constitution that the city itself present a local home rule message, a request from the City Council to the State Legislature for such a surcharge. Of course the City Council needed to put its fingerprint on the program.

When I first broached the idea of this plan, I focused entirely on funding for law enforcement, primarily police, district attorneys, corrections, probation, and courts. City Council speaker Peter Vallone of Queens, apparently fearful of a political backlash, argued that the program should be funded through the state lottery rather than with income tax surcharges or property tax increases. Our soundings from Albany indicated that the legislature would not change the law concerning the lottery, whose sole purpose was to fund education and related programs; it could not be used without amendment to cover any other public expenditure, no matter how laudable the criminal justice programs seemed. The legislative leadership feared that using the lottery to finance Safe Streets would reduce the revenue going to school systems around the state, thereby either forcing the state to find other sources to make up the difference or putting the burden on cities, counties, and school districts. The idea was dead on arrival.

Moreover, they felt that the City Council, which was in the forefront of demanding increased police services, needed to put skin in the game and agree to increase local taxes. At the same time, we were hearing from our constituents that more needed to be done than simply hiring more cops to prevent young people from engaging in criminal activity. Judge Mollen and Norman Steisel realized that we could support such initiatives, and use the lottery for those undertakings, if they had an educational component. It was at this point that the program was expanded to include Beacon schools and other after-school mentoring initiatives. Speaker Vallone, not enamored of those parts of the plan, was nevertheless boxed in by his early advocacy of the lottery and did not want to oppose my social-minded advocacy organizations; he was also already committed to raising taxes for the police portion of the program we all desperately wanted to implement.

At my insistence, the planners were given a month to develop a comprehensive, thoughtful plan, a time frame that was roundly criticized by many who said it demonstrated my indecisiveness. Rather than wasting time, they argued, we should merely hire a thousand cops and be done with it. Although we were badgered by critics and opinion makers, by biding our time we were able to tease out the political positions of those whom we needed to win over and to modify the plan before it was actually announced. We accomplished our goals, and the benefits continue to accrue to the city to this day.

...

Judge Mollen was our chief negotiator with Albany. His position—and he fought like hell for it in our meetings preceding his lobbying efforts—was that in order to be realistic and not engender political flak, the legislation had to be targeted. He said, “If we’re going to get this legislation through, it must have a section stating that the increase in personal income tax will be provided solely for the funding of Safe Streets, Safe City; it will be segregated, it will not go into the general treasury, and it will be used for no other budgetary purposes; otherwise, they won’t give us the increase.”

Why? Because upstate legislators don’t trust the city of New York. And they don’t trust the mayor. They don’t care who the mayor is—they don’t trust him. They didn’t trust Ed Koch, they didn’t trust me, and they didn’t trust Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg. Their position is that the mayor of New York always tries to get money and then doesn’t stick to the original plans for which the funds were conceived; the legislators feel that New York City mayors use state funds for budgetary purposes other than those originally stated, and often the legislators don’t agree with these purposes. Upstaters think that social programs do not mean anything in the city.

Judge Mollen’s staff included budget director Phil Michaels, the very bright and cooperative deputy budget director Mike Jacobson, chief of staff and special counsel Katie Lapp, and City Council special advisor Linda Gibbs. All but Michaels headed for Albany during a special session called by Gov. Mario Cuomo in early December 1990 with the specific intention of getting our legislation passed immediately, because we were truly in an emergency situation. We were concerned about crime and its impact on New Yorkers, and we were concerned about our kids.

In a corridor, Judge Mollen passed Democratic assemblyman from Staten Island Eric N. Vitaliano. “Eric,” he said, “I assume we have your vote on Safe Streets, Safe City.” The assemblyman responded, “Judge, I can’t support it. My people, they want cops. They don’t care about kids, they want cops. They don’t want to pay increased taxes. If you take the cost for the kids’ program out, I can be for it.” Mollen told him, “The kids are staying in there. Along with cops, kids are nearest and dearest to the mayor’s heart. It’s the right thing to do. I can’t believe you’re going to hesitate voting for it. Do whatever your conscience tells you to do, but I cannot believe you are going to vote against this because we included programs for kids along with the cops. The criminals on Staten Island, at one time they were kids and they became criminals because we didn’t have the right types of programs for them.” Ultimately we got this assemblyman’s vote.

The key players were the governor, the State Senate, and the State Assembly. Governor Cuomo wasn’t a problem; he understood the urgency of our situation and when approached supported our efforts. Judge Mollen then started down the list. The Senate was under Republican control, and he turned his attention to Majority Leader Ralph Marino, of Nassau County on Long Island. The judge paid his respects and then said, “We’d like your support.” Judge Mollen felt like Santa Claus handing out goodies—how could anybody oppose more cops and more help for kids? Our plan was sound, we were offering expanded services after a long period of having received none, and we were not being profligate in attempting to handle our need. People accepted the fact that you had to pay to get more cops and that government attention to the facilities for the kids would make them useful, worthy, and productive.

Republicans held about a four-vote majority in the Senate, and Majority Leader Marino was a straight shooter. Judge Mollen didn’t like what he had to say, but at least it was honest. Marino told him, “We have six Republican senators from New York City. If they favor this, I’ll let it go to the floor of the Senate. Otherwise, it doesn’t get there.” Without the support of these six men, our bill would not come to a vote. Judge Mollen went to work. Manhattan senator Roy Goodman, who had run for mayor against Ed Koch in 1977, was entirely supportive. Guy Velella of the Bronx was similarly agreeable. John Marchi, a sweetheart from Staten Island who had beaten John Lindsay in the 1969 Republican mayoral primary but lost to him in the general election and lost again to Abe Beame in 1973, was also on board. Unfortunately, two senators from Queens were not so cooperative: Frank Padavan and Serphin Maltese. Mollen went to see Maltese. “Judge,” the senator told him, “I understand what you want to do. We do need the cops, we need this. But I am historically always opposed to increased taxes. I cannot support the tax.” Judge Mollen was preparing a reply when Senator Maltese said, “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I won’t put my thumb on it.” Meaning, he would tell Majority Leader Marino that he did not oppose the bill going to the floor. Maltese said, “You don’t need my vote. Everybody else is going to vote for it. I’m going to vote against it so I’m consistent with my principles, but I’m not going to stop it from getting to the floor.” The judge appreciated the gesture, which went a long way toward sealing our victory.

Senator Padavan had his own concerns. He asked Mollen, “Who’s gonna decide where the additional police go?”

“The police commissioner,” the judge replied. A significant portion of the NYPD’s report on resource allocation was focused on a breakout of exactly how many cops were required in specific locations. “That’s his responsibility, that’s his job. He knows where they’re needed most.”

“I don’t trust them,” Padavan said. “I want to have a say in how many police come to my precinct.”

“The mayor doesn’t interfere with the police commissioner. The commissioner decides on the basis of need where the police are allocated; he puts them where the murders take place, and the robberies.”

Padavan should have known better. He had been in city government as deputy commissioner of buildings under Mayor Lindsay. Yet he was unmoved. He refused out of hand to agree to this legislation without a deal. Judge Mollen said, “Senator, forget it. It isn’t going to happen. I’ll call the mayor. You want me to do that? I’ll call the mayor.” Mollen put me on the phone. “Mr. Mayor, Padavan wants to decide how many cops his precincts are going to get. You talk to him.”

“Senator Padavan.”

“Mr. Mayor.”

“You know we need these cops. Times are bad, as of course you are aware. Our forces are depleted. People are dying in the streets of Harlem.”

Senator Padavan told me, “My constituency is concerned with auto theft and graffiti.”

I about hit the roof. Such remarkable selfishness. I believe I cursed him up and down, and he deserved it.

Judge Mollen saved the day. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said to the senator once I had put down the phone. “When the police commissioner makes his allocations, if you want, I will arrange for you to ask him, and he will tell you the breakdown of where all the cops are going.” The judge made the offer sound like a concession, but this information was actually a matter of public record to which the average citizen is entitled. Padavan took what he must have considered a victory and finally agreed to support the bill. Now we had all six. Judge Mollen reported back to Marino, “You can go to the floor with this.”

That was only the beginning of the process, however. Now that he was committed to bringing the bill to a vote, Marino assigned Republican aide Abe Blackman to work with us on the details of the legislation. The hours they devoted to this work were extensive, and it was necessary to abide by the legislature’s culture. When members of the Assembly heard we were meeting with Senate people, they got suspicious. So we had to meet with the Assembly people. When the senators heard we had met with the Assembly people, they wanted more time. It was that kind of madhouse up there. Still, one by one we eliminated all of the problems.

One night near the end of our negotiations, around one o’clock in the morning, as we were trying to win the approval and support of both parties on a nonpartisan basis, trying to make everybody happy, one of the Senate Republicans brought in a document he thought all involved ought to see. “Judge,” he said, “we just got this message from the fire department saying you are going to close a dozen firehouses.”

There it was on Fire Department stationery. Judge Mollen called and woke up Norman Steisel. “Do you know anything about this supposed letter from the fire commissioner?” He did not. The judge woke up several other members of our inner circle. No one knew anything about it.

In fact, it was a lie. The document was a forgery, a counterfeit letter supposedly from the fire commissioner saying I had authorized that the fire department be included in the Safe Streets program, adding to its expense; otherwise, there would be closings. We tried to piece this together. The answer we ultimately arrived at was that the fire unions always worked on the principle “Anything the police get, we want to get,” and since Safe Streets, Safe City was going to increase the size of the Police Department by 40 percent, they were going to use this increased police budget to get their share of the goodies and wanted to stop the process until they could work out a deal. For this reason, someone created this phony letter and sent it up to Albany. Discovered to be a forgery, the document was discounted and the work moved forward.

Judge Mollen, his group, Blackman, and the Senate staff had an agreement in principle but were working on the technical details. By this time it was very late, and they were still working on the provisions. Time was of the essence; we wanted to get the bill passed later that same day. Someone whom the judge did not recognize entered the room, walked over to Blackman, whispered in his ear, and then departed. Blackman looked at Mollen. “Judge,” he said, “I have bad news for you.” Mollen looked back. It was three o’clock in the morning. “They just voted to adjourn.” The special session was over.

Often in the newspapers Judge Mollen is referred to as a soft-spoken gentleman. Not this time. He took out a book and threw it on the table. “I’m getting out of this nest of vipers!” He quickly gathered his papers and headed out the door. To his credit, Blackman ran and stopped him just outside the door.

“Judge,” Blackman said, “relax. I know how upset you are, and I appreciate that. You’ll get your bill the first thing when we come back in January. You’re going to get your bill.” He said, “I can’t do anything about the recess. If they’re adjourned, I can’t stop that. But I promise you, you’ll get it early in the session. You’re not going to have to wait long.”

Judge Mollen was not happy to be on the 5:00 am train back to the city.

But the Republicans did keep their word. The legislature reconvened in January 1991 and by the end of the first month the legislation was passed. Governor Cuomo signed it on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. But there was still one last piece of flesh they had to get out of us!

Because the senators still didn’t trust us about the money, because they were concerned that we would use the allocated funds to satisfy other New York City needs, the legislature demanded a memorandum of understanding, signed by me and Judge Mollen on behalf of the city, and also by the governor’s office, the Senate, and the Assembly, stating that the money would be used only for the purposes of Safe Streets, Safe City. If any money was diverted from that program, New York City would lose that amount from the taxes we collected. After another round of negotiation, we worked out the terms of the memorandum of understanding and signed it. The bill passed. Safe Streets, Safe City: Cops and Kids was on its way.

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We kept our word and never abused the sanctity of the funds. The money was used in accordance with the memorandum of understanding, and it turned the tide.

A popular conception is that crime in New York City ran rampant during my administration. This is simply not true. Crime, which had been rising steadily for almost fifteen years, crested during my time in office and began to fall. In the last two years of my term, 1992 and 1993, for the first time in history, all seven major crime categories—murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and arson—declined. These are not New York Police Department statistics, these are FBI statistics.

In fact, the decrease could have begun earlier, and there are some who believe that I did myself a political disservice by planning for these cops to be hired over the course of several years. NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton in his autobiography Turnaround (written with my co-author, Peter Knobler) noted:

If [Dinkins] had hired 2,000 cops in January 1993 they would have been through the academy and on the streets that summer, just in time to be a positive issue in the campaign. The streets would have been swimming with cops. To all those who felt Dinkins was soft on crime, he could have shown pictures of himself and 2,000 cops being sworn in at Madison Square Garden. . . . Dinkins got no credit; most of the cops for whom he won funding didn’t come on the job until after the election. In the first six months of Giuliani’s term, the new mayor attended two graduation ceremonies and implicitly took credit for 4,200 additional police officers.

The idea did occur to me.

The original Safe Streets, Safe City document mandated that the hiring be done over a two-year period. However, in an attempt to limit annual taxes, when the legislature approved the plan the expansion of the police force was spread over three years. Because this was funded by a surcharge to existing taxes, the city and state agreed in a memorandum of understanding that we could delay hiring up to 25 percent of any police recruitment class in a given year if we promised to make it up by the end of the plan, sometime in the coming three years. In this way, at my discretion, we could take a temporary budget saving if necessary. There was also a fallback plan in the eventuality of an even deeper financial emergency: New York City could skip a full year’s worth of hiring if we could justify doing so in writing to the legislature and convince them of our terrible state of affairs, on the condition that we would hire a full complement of officers the following year.

Because of the continuing recession throughout the United States, New York City’s general tax collections were declining and our budget projections were not realized. What we thought we had enough money to pay for, we didn’t. As a result, we exercised that 25 percent rule more than once and cut back on the number of hirings. By the time we got into the last year, we were constantly under pressure from the governor and the Financial Control Board to do a better job of managing the budget. The question became: should we stick with our budget plan? We had demonstrated the efficacy of our policing initiative with two years’ worth of police hiring: for the first time in years, crime in New York City was beginning to come down. A debate arose among my deputy mayors and advisers: do we hire more cops now, or do we keep the budget tighter by rolling the hires forward?

Some argued that we were under legislative mandate and our course of action was cast in iron. We had implemented two years of Safe Streets, Safe City; did we now want to admit that, under heavy pressure from Governor Cuomo and the Financial Control Board, and for political purposes—to manage the budget—we were abandoning that commitment? Their feeling was that we had made a commitment to the legislature, we had a plan, we had implemented half of it, and we needed to stay on course.

Others argued that this course would cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million at a time when we could ill afford it. If we rolled the hires forward, it would achieve the equivalent savings of firing or losing by attrition, somewhere else in the system, five thousand city workers without five thousand workers actually losing their jobs.

Adding to their argument was the fact that when I had instructed Commissioner Brown to investigate the needs of the Police Department, I had simultaneously asked for specific proposals to reorganize the agency and improve productivity. Commissioner Brown had responded with substantial recommendations; he suggested internal redeployments, improved reassignments, and elimination of certain staff functions. Those who argued for delaying the hiring insisted that even if we slowed the introduction of more police officers onto the force, the number of police on patrol, on the street, and available to fight crime had actually already risen, and that growth had already contributed to a drop in crime. We would get double duty: greater productivity and low cost. We would protect and serve the citizens of New York with increased effectiveness, and we would have a better story to tell come election time, including a story of more effective budget management: there were more cops on the force, as we had promised, though it was going to take a little longer before they had all arrived on the job; there were already more cops on the street; and lo and behold, there was less crime across the board in New York City for the first time since the 1950s.

We went where the money was. We made the decision not to hire the extra cops that year. The city was still in grave financial difficulty, and I felt it was necessary to postpone what might have been a political bonanza as well as a civic benefit. Then, of course, we lost the election and looked like jerks. We really did not see that coming. As Commissioner Bratton indicated, the decrease in crime that was so instrumental in New York City’s 1990s renaissance, and for which my successor took credit, was conceived and begun on my watch.